Short takes: New Zealand books

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Deborah Knowles, editor: Mixed Blessings: New Zealand children of Holocaust survivors remember

Tandem, $34.95

Manying Ip, editor: Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand

AUP, $44.99

Two newly published books provide intriguing glimpses into other New Zealanders' lives and worlds and, though they are different, they remind us that New Zealanders are a multi-ethnic lot with a pick'n'mix of histories, traditions, memories and identities.

Mixed Blessings is a collection of intense, personal reminiscences by members of the Second Generation Group - people who grew up, as one contributor puts it, in a "void" of relatives, often with no grandparents or extended family.

The book is about making connections with missing families, as Deborah Knowles says in her introduction. "It is important for us to try to understand what Jewish life had been like before Hitler, so that it becomes possible to build a bridge over the void that divides the time before the war from after the war. Maybe then we can establish a feeling of continuity."

The stories honour the dead by naming and describing them. They also honour those who struggled on after all that death, coming to New Zealand, resuming life in such a distant place with none of the familiar sounds, smells or tastes of home.

Again and again, it's food that conjures up these lost homes and relatives, and the contributors include favourite recipes with their stories. Kirsten Warner writes of how her non-Jewish mother cooked Jewish food to honour the loss experienced by her husband, Gunter Warner, whose parents were murdered after ensuring his escape from Berlin in 1939. (Gunter's sense of humour is both sharp and bitter: "If there is a God then he is most surely anti-Semitic," he says.)

There is much sadness in these pages, such as in Penelope Bieder's image of her difficult father, whose "whole world had been taken up like a carton of papers and tossed into the river. He spent the rest of his life running downstream, trying to pick up and fish out the pieces". But there is also a strong sense of intimacy and pride.

Unfolding History, Evolving Identity is a different book, predominantly intellectual rather than emotional, although the subject matter is no less riveting or humanitarian. It is a comprehensive look at the history and experience of Chinese people in New Zealand from the 1860s up to the present.

"For more than 130 years, the Chinese have remained the archetypal alien in New Zealand: the 'essential outsider', deemed inscrutable, unassimilable," Manying Ip says in her preface.

This eclectic selection of essays by a range of experts and academics covers the pioneering Chinese goldminers of Southland and Otago and the official policies of exclusion directed against them, the settler communities, immigration since 1987, and "politics of survival", or how the Chinese have sought to define their identity while negotiating their position with the dominant groups.

For a general reader the third section, with its more personalised stories, seems the most captivating. For instance, take its fascinating portrait of the nearest thing to a Chinatown New Zealand had, Wellington's Haining St, which was reviled as a place of gambling and opium dens, but was really just a place where Chinese people went about their daily lives. Or Jenny Bol Jun Lee's "Eating Pork Bones and Puha With Chopsticks", her story of growing up Chinese and Maori. Or Kirsten Wong's family history.

Overall, though, perhaps the most arresting point is one made by Ip in her introduction to the third section, dealing with immigration since 1987: "Chinese in New Zealand do not constitute one homogeneous 'Chinese community' as mainstream New Zealand society often sees them," she says. The new immigrants, she goes on to add intriguingly,"are truly global citizens and, although they may hold New Zealand passports and many have a strong sense of allegiance and goodwill towards their adopted country, being 'New Zealanders' may not mean staying put in New Zealand."